Curran’s ‘Home’-coming celebration

Alessandra Baldacchino as Small Alison and Robert Petkoff as Bruce in "Fun Home" at the Curran.

Photo: Joan Marcus, The Curran

“My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town,” says the eldest of three Alisons (Kate Shindle) early in the musical “Fun Home.” “And he was gay. And I was gay. And he killed himself. And I became a lesbian cartoonist.”

Those are indeed all the major plot points of this Tony-winning musical, whose national tour opened Thursday, Jan. 26, at the newly and gorgeously renovated Curran theater. They’re also what makes “Fun Home” such an unlikely, refreshing and, I hope, a trend-setting success for a mainstream musical.

Yet the show’s most telling quote has little to do with these specific flash points in the life of Alison Bechdel, from whose autobiographical graphic novel librettist Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori adapted the musical. It’s a lyric, in the song “Maps,” that thoughtfully captures something more universal — the flawed, perhaps doomed effort to grow up, to establish and own one’s own place in the world: “What do you know that’s not your dad’s mythology?”

Alison is singing to her younger self, Small Alison (Alessandra Baldacchino), whose school project her father, Bruce (Robert Petkoff), has just tried to commandeer, trying to “make it better,” “substantial and beautiful,” since Alison is about to “ruin it.”

It’s the 1970s — the fittingly kitschy stripes and plaids of David Zinn’s costume design never let you forget that — and different parenting mores prevailed, even for Alison’s hyper-educated and artistic parents.

Her mother, Helen (Susan Moniz), on her own planet playing a mournful Chopin on the piano, could scold, “Stop bothering me,” without being condemned by her world as a terrible parent. Her father could offhandedly threaten, “I’ll whale you,” without even looking up.

Curran’s ‘Home’-coming celebration

1of 3Kate Shindle as Alison in "Fun Home" at the Curran.Photo: Joan Marcus, The Curran

2of 3From left:�Kate Shindle as Alison, Abby�Corrigan as Medium Alison and Alessandra�Baldacchino as Small Alison in "Fun Home" at the Curran.Photo: Joan Marcus, The Curran

3of 3Robert Petkoff as Bruce and Kate Shindle as Alison in "Fun Home" at the Curran.Photo: Joan Marcus, The Curran

But the musical doesn’t portray him as a one-sided monster. Bruce sublimates all deep feelings, both the pure and the forbidden, into narrowly circumscribed spheres: literature and the historical restoration of his own museum-like home.

What comes across in these moments is that, no matter when you grew up, your family members are ultimately unknowable, even as you share genes, propensities, history, even as your parents’ consciousnesses can expand to snuff out any mental space you might claim as your own.

The song “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue” encapsulates that phenomenon especially well. Eldest Alison and Helen phrase each lyric in terms of what “he wants” — that’s Bruce.

Director Sam Gold beautifully echoes that dynamic much later, when Bruce is side-lit in a doorway, ready to abscond into the night to cruise for boys in New York, abandoning Small Alison and her brothers (Lennon Nate Hammond and Pierson Salvador) in an empty squat.

In that moment he is as every parent to a child at bedtime — huge, a little scary, like a portal into some vast unknown — even as he’s also small, despicable for putting his lust before his children’s well-being.

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So lovely and complex is every song, every stage picture, that it’s easy to forgive off-key singing from many performers and some mixing that rendered the first song as a wall of sound and the lyrics to the kids’ Jackson 5-esque “Come to the Fun Home” as mostly unintelligible.

Also compensating is the show’s one superstar singer: Abby Corrigan as Medium Alison, who’s discovering her sexuality in college with the aid of the more experienced Joan (Karen Eilbacher). Corrigan is equally at home with a belt and a fluttery, flutelike soprano, backed by a spare but stirring seven-person orchestra, and her acting corresponds.

When she says the word “lesbian” out loud, it’s as if electricity jolts through her; her appealing nerdiness contrasts delectably with Shindle’s contralto sarcasm as Alison winces through Medium Alison’s adolescent journal.

The eldest Alison remains onstage for almost all of the play, a spectral presence witnessing and attempting to caption — she is a cartoonist, after all — shards of memory. The way she succeeds, the way she writes her own mythology, isn’t as a lone artist and thinker toiling away in a studio, or even by imagining a confrontation with Bruce; it’s by summoning and honoring the past selves who are still alive in her.

Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State.